On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Jason Thorpe wrote:

>  > Yeah, again, I said something slightly different from what I meant.
>  > Binary packages per se don't bother me; I just ignore the silly things.
>  > What I really don't want is to see something like SGI's inst: it uses a
>  > complicated and undocumented package format, is dogmatically inflexible
> 
> Hmmm ... are you sure it's not the package format described in the
> SVR4 ABI?

Nah.  Irix's packaging utility is one of the greatest added-value
features of Irix.  It supports a multi-depth hierarchy of packages,
with seperately installable sub-packages, multiple-way `fat' packages,
very in-depth dependency information, and neato command line, terminal
menu and motif interfaces to install and remove packages.  The Irix
version of install(1) even has mods to work with the package system...
For example, you can build a package from source and specify that it
should be installed as if it had been unpacked from a specific version
of a specific package...

--
				Jim Wise
				jim.wise@turner.com